Middle East & Africa

NAIROBI: The maximum price of the top grade Kenyan tea held steady at$3.40 at this week's auction, Africa Tea Brokers (ATB) said on Thursday. Kenya is the world's leading exporter of black tea and the crop is a major source of foreign exchange. The east African country holds its weekly sale at the port of Mombasa. Best Broken Pekoe Ones (BP1s) fetched $2.10-$3.40 compared with $2.00-$3.40 per kg at last week's sale, ATB said in its weekly market report.Best Brighter Pekoe Fanning Ones (PF1s) sold at $2.40-$2.84 compared with $2.42-$2.80 per kg last week. Producers offered 9.57 million kg of tea during the sale and 15.86 percent did not get buyers, ATB said. Copyright Reuters, 2014 ...

NAIROBI: The maximum price of Kenya's top grade AA coffee fell to $329 per 50 kg bag at this week's auction on Tuesday from $371 at last week's sale, the Nairobi Coffee Exchange said.The east African nation is a fairly small producer by global standards, but its quality beans are used by roasters to blend with beans from other regions.Grade AA coffee sold at $195-$329 per bag, compared with $180-$376 at last week's auction, the ...

DUBAI: Saudi crude exports fell in August for the fourth month in a row to their lowest levels in three years, while volumes used by local refineries rose to a record high, official data showed on Monday.The world's top oil exporter and OPEC heavyweight exported 6.663 million barrels per day in August, down from 6.989 million bpd in July and 6.946 million bpd in June, according to data published by the Joint Organisations Data Initiative ...

CAIRO: Egypt's government has approved plans to allow the export of rice, the supplies minister said on Thursday, bringing a major medium-grain rice exporter back into the international market for the first time since 2013.Traders would be allowed to export rice provided they sell the government one tonne of medium-grain rice at 2,000 Egyptian pounds($279.72) for every tonne of rice they export.Exporters would also have to pay a tariff of $280 per tonne exported, the ...

KAMPALA: Uganda coffee exports for September fell by 7 percent to 207, 927 60-kg bags of coffee compared with the same month a year ago, an industry source said on Thursday, extending a pattern of lower exports this year. Industry experts in Uganda, Africa's number one exporter of coffee which mostly cultivates the robusta variety, said the coffee yield is usually poorer in some parts of the country at this time of the year. "We're ...

CAIRO: Egypt, the world's biggest wheat importer, will stop purchasing wheat until March 2015, the supplies minister said on Saturday."After the recent purchase of 175,000 tonnes of French and Russian wheat to produce subsidized bread, the strategic reserve of wheat is enough to last until the first week of next March," Supplies Minister Khaled Hanafi said in a statement.The recent purchase consisted of 120,000 tonnes of French wheat and 55,000 tonnes of Russian wheat at ...

ABIDJAN: Cocoa arrivals at ports in top grower Ivory Coast reached around 1,719,000 tonnes by Sept. 21 since the start of the season on Oct. 2, exporters estimated on Monday, up from 1,462,000 tonnes in the same period of the previous season. Exporters estimated around 9,000 tonnes of beans were delivered to the West African state's two ports of Abidjan and San Pedro between Sept. 15 and 21, down from 20,000 tonnes during the same ...